But there’s still a problem: Each individual data collector provides insight into just a single aspect of Web users’ interests, and none of them talk to each other. If they did, all the data would be worth more. A list of men in the market for new cars will certainly boosts ad prices over a newspaper ad. Now imagine what advertisers would pay to meet 25- to 45-year-old male SUV shoppers with incomes over $150,000 in California.

Enter Rubicon Project, a Los Angeles advertising technology firm. They see opportunity bridging the gap. This week, Rubicon acquired Others Online, a Seattle company that helps publishers improve their sites by studying data on what their users are reading and searching for. Rubicon says it can use Others Online’s algorithms to scan across all the data services publishers use to sift out the best ways to sell ads at premium prices. “Advertisers fundamentally want to buy specific audiences,” says Frank Addante, Rubicon Project’s founder.

By helping publishers characterize and segment their audiences, Addante thinks he can boost demand, and prices, for nearly all types of Web ads. Such a shift would be a relief to media companies that have watched ad prices plummet in recent years as new players like blogs and social networks flooded the Web with new ad inventory.

The data play is an extension of Rubicon’s existing business, which focuses on helping publishers determine which third-party ad networks and exchanges can unload their ad inventory for the highest prices. The company already helps 40,000 Web sites like the digital arms of the
Washington Post Co.
and
Gannett
figure out which ad brokers can most profitably sell their ads. The ad broker optimization service, which Addante says boosts ad prices by 50% on average, has won over so many publishers that Rubicon now handles more advertising impressions than every company but
Google
and
Yahoo
, according to Web analytics firm Quantcast.

An Illinois Institute of Technology dropout who has already sold two start-ups, Addante formed Rubicon Project in 2007, when VCs and big tech companies were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in nascent firms to track Web users and sell ads on behalf of media companies. Addante says he initially wasn’t sure what the company would do but that he wanted to build “an uberplatform” that incorporated the expanding universe of ad tech services.

Addante envisions his system working this way: A newspaper Web site has a pile of ad space it cannot sell. This is a common problem for paper Web sites, as sections like local news, international affairs and politics have less appeal to advertisers than finance, travel or lifestyle.

So the site turns over responsibility for finding an audience for the ads to Rubicon, which applies an array of user data services from firms like BlueKai or Exelate to better understand who is looking at paper’s Web pages. The system might identify, say, 1,000 readers who are affluent mothers currently shopping for island vacations.

Rubicon’s engine then analyzes which advertising networks or exchanges have advertisers desperately looking for exactly that segment of Web users and determine which of the brokers can offer the highest price. Rubicon’s system accounts for the transaction costs associated with each ad sale: the commission paid to the ad broker, the cost of the user data and a 15% fee collected by Rubicon itself. Data firms BlueKai, Targusinfo and Exelate, hoping to expand their useful markets, have already signed on to participate.